


Cry Havoc and Let Slip

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Paint The Sky With Stars [55]
Category: Night World - L. J. Smith, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 20:37:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9513176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: Written for the comment_fic prompt: "Stargate: Atlantis, John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Backlit."AU of First Contact/The Tribe continues. Atlantis is struck a second time, Rodney and Daniel are taken, Delos teaches John that he's a Wild Power, and John comes to a terrible conclusion.





	

Daniel, John, Radek, Rodney, and Delos were crowded around the console in the lab, trying to find something, anything on the device. Now that Delos and John had proven able to work together in an emergency, they were grudgingly side by side, John running math cyphers, Delos running linguistic cyphers. They were barely speaking aloud, communicating mostly by telepathy, and it only vaguely occurred to John that the others were probably freaked out by their silence.

Atlantis had been attacked while Teldy and Woolsey were off-world, trying to work on Beckett’s Wraith cure for Todd and his Hive allies, and Dorsey was in charge. Dorsey was a perfectly capable soldier, but he’d never been in command long-term while Teldy was off-world, and he’d never handled a crisis quite like this. John itched to head up to Control, establish air patrols and lines of evacuation to the jumpers, but that wasn’t his job. He was basically a scientist, now. A scientist with a gun.

He had no idea who the attackers were, just that their technology was at least on par with the Ancients, and they’d taken a device from a recently-discovered lab. It had to be important, if they’d gone to that much effort to take it. If it was in Janus’s lab, it was experimental, and therefore potentially dangerous. That they’d been able to come straight to the lab meant they either knew the layout of Atlantis previously, or they had sophisticated tracking capabilities. Rodney had set the scientists and a team of Marines to sweep everything in the lab - and all the previously-discovered but unidentified devices in storage - to see if anything was giving off any latent subspace transmissions. If they were broadcasting their new position to the galaxy at large, that was a bad, bad thing.

Radek had isolated images of the invaders on the security feed and uploaded them into the database, to see if there were any references to the species, but it was coming up pretty blank. Given how Daniel had found reference to Janus’s lab in a more obscure place, they were searching wider than the public database, going through what Lantean personal databases were available, and that kind of search would take a very long time.

“If you want to know how to turn men into women and back again, there’s an Ancient device for that, but it doesn’t look anything like the one the attackers took,” Daniel said.

Delos said, “There’s a spell for that, too. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve heard it’s useful.”

“Useful?” Radek asked. “What for?”

Delos shrugged. “Stealth and infiltration, mostly. Let’s see the device?” He crossed the lab, peered at the console Radek and Daniel were checking. “There. See, it requires very specialized spell components. Not the raw forms, highly processed forms, but here, here, and here, they have to be inserted into the machine before the transformation can take place.”

“You’re getting distracted,” Rodney grumbled, and Delos said,

“Apologies, Dr. McKay. Cousin, I need you to solve this, right here.” He returned to John’s side, pointed to a portion of the screen he’d been reading.

“Exactly what kind of math are you capable of?” John asked. “Just basic arithmetic, or -?”

“Give me an abacus and I’ll show you.” Delos had a pencil and paper and was scribbling, rearranging letters and letters, trying to find words.

“Focus!” Rodney snapped.

Radek cleared his throat. “I will go and get us some more coffee.” He ducked out of the lab.

John turned, crossed the lab. “Hey,” he said gently to Rodney, “maybe we should all take a break.”

Rodney shook his head. “No. We need to figure this out and figure it out now. Our position is known and we are obviously vulnerable to the superior technology of those who know our position, and we need to make ourselves safe.”

“We won’t figure it out if we’re exhausted.” John put his hands lightly on Rodney’s shoulders. “Come on.”

“John -”

_Rodney, you almost died a few hours ago. Please, slow down._

John knew Delos couldn’t overhear when he spoke to Rodney across their soulmate bond, but having another vampire so close, especially a lamia and another Redfern at that, was incredibly unnerving.

Rodney’s shoulders were tense under John’s hands, but they relaxed a fraction. “Yeah. Let’s take a break. Regroup, collate what we all know.”

Delos tapped at his radio and called Radek to let him know they were taking a break in the cafeteria. Delos was a vampire, and apparently Daniel was clued into that fact, but no one else seemed to be. Delos hadn’t said anything about the Night World Council, nor had he said anything about any of the East Coast Witch Circles (as a Redfern, with Hunter Redfern’s golden eyes, he was part witch as well). He was, by all appearances, just a linguist along to help Daniel. And he was a talented linguist. And he was - young, too. Probably around his physical age; he didn’t have that uncanny agelessness behind his eyes, like John had seen in the likes of Thierry Descoudres and Maya Dragonslayer.

Whatever Delos had been doing before the SGC, he’d led a fairly tech-sheltered existence, the way a lot of old vampires did, clinging to the ways of their last mortal eras, and he was always volunteering to make radio calls or otherwise do technical things.

Delos was strong, undoubtedly from a pure Redfern line, and John was wary of him, but so far he’d proved an ally, especially in the fight against the unknown alien invaders.

Radek met them in the cafeteria with mugs of coffee for all of them (except Delos, who preferred tea and thought coffee was bitter and _terribly modern_ ).

What they knew was depressingly little. They had no idea who the alien invaders were or what the device was. Janus’s cypher wasn’t a single unified cypher but individual cyphers on each project.

“It’s like personal web accounts,” Radek said. “People have different accounts for online services, and each account requires a password, and each password is different. Janus has encoded each project independently.”

“Humans aren’t capable of truly random patterns, not even the brightest ones,” Daniel said.

“A machine can do random generation,” Rodney pointed out.

“But that random generation is based on an algorithm generated by humans. And Janus is so untrusting that he wouldn’t trust his encryption to a computer program that could, in the end, be reduced to a single key.” Daniel eschewed the datapads Rodney and the rest of the scientists on Atlantis favored, did a lot of his figuring by hand, in a notebook. He had his notebook open at his elbow and kept frowning at it between bites of food. “But I think I’m noticing a pattern.”

“What kind?” Rodney asked. “Numerical? Mathematical? Physics-based?”

“Literary,” Daniel said.

Rodney frowned.

John cleared his throat. “How so?”

“I keep seeing repeated names in some of the text cyphers,” Daniel said. “The letters keep resolving themselves into the Ancient equivalents of Jupiter, Aquila, and Catamitus. They’re anagrams of the names and the like.”

Delos hummed thoughtfully. “You said Janus had many lovers, yes?”

Daniel nodded.

“Were all of his lovers female?”

John choked on a mouthful of mashed tava root. “What?”

Delos looked startled by John’s question, then sighed. “Of course. Your classical education was neglected. Jupiter, in the form of an _aquila_ , seduced Catamitus, and made him immortal, the cup-bearer of the gods, and immortalized him in the stars as _Aquarius_.”

Rodney said, “So you’re saying Janus was basically like every nerdy fanboy on Earth and structured all of his cyphers based on his favorite, if obscure, fandom.”

“I don’t know how the Ancient version of the tale plays out,” Daniel said. “We’ve uncovered vast libraries of Ancient literature in the database, but no one’s really analyzed them, since the focus of this expedition is science, and the progress of humanity.”

John knew that sour note in his voice, had heard it in Rodney’s when Rodney wanted to check out an interesting console and they were supposed to be on the lookout for Wraith.

“Maybe,” Radek said, “someone needs to analyze those books after all.”

Daniel nodded around a mouthful of salad. “Hopefully just the one. There may be other names in there we can use as the base for codes, and also some numbers. How many stars are in Aquarius? How many light years from Earth? From Pegasus or the original planet Lantea? That sort of thing.”

It was definite progress, better than what they’d had before.

Rodney swallowed down some coffee. “Okay. Delos, Daniel, you two head to the database and see if you can’t transfer a copy of of the relevant literature onto a datapad. John, Radek, and I will head down to the lab and start with those numbers about Aquarius and the like.”

John could feel Rodney’s mind buzzing, knew if he stepped into Rodney’s inscape he’d see galaxies whirling and spinning, lights dancing. Rodney’s mind was so beautiful.

They finished their food and bussed their trays, headed to the transporter in the main control tower. Rodney wanted to check in with Chuck and Amelia, see if they’d uncovered any other data from the shield breach.

Alarms sounded.

“Hyperspace window opening,” Amelia said.

Dorsey, who’d been hovering near the master life signs detector, began barking orders into his radio, for the jumpers flying patrol, for Marines to scramble to battle stations.

It all happened so fast. The alien ship sliced through the shield, a hot knife through butter, didn’t even bother docking at a pier. It flew right up to the control tower, and those armored aliens stepped out, balancing on some kind of levitating plate, and cut through one of the windows.

“Rodney!” Daniel cupped his palms, brow furrowed, trying to summon witch fire.

An explosion shook the tower. John went flying. He let his vampire instincts take over, righted himself midair, landed like a cat. There was smoke and glass and cries of pain.

The last he saw of Rodney, he was backlit by the sickly yellow glow of alien tech. And then Rodney’s mind winked out, dropping unconscious, and the aliens scooped him up. Another grabbed Daniel, and they retreated through the hole in the window.

John snarled and lunged after them. Took a blast to the chest. Someone screamed. John lay on the floor, barely able to breathe, trying to crawl across the broken glass to the window, to Rodney. He could only watch, helpless, as the ship sliced back out through the shield, carrying Rodney and Daniel away.

John reached out across the silver cord, but it was thin, stretched too thin, by great distance, they were going into hyperspace, they were -

His world went dark.

*

John woke in the infirmary.

“Cousin, you’re awake.”

Delos stood beside his bed.

Keller was at his side in an instant. “How’re you feeling, Colonel?”

“Where’s Rodney?” John pushed himself up, groaned. “I feel like I got hit by a bus.”

“By a bomb blast,” Keller said. “And then you crawled through broken glass. I got it all out of you, and now the cuts are all healed, but Delos tells me even your kind feel it when bombs go off.”

“Has anyone managed to reach Woolsey and Teldy?”

Delos shrugged.

Keller shook her head. “The _Daedalus_ hasn’t dropped out of hyperspace yet.”

“Get me Zelenka.” John heaved himself to his feet, winced when his ribs creaked. “We need to track them. I have an idea.”

“Do you need to - to feed?” Keller asked. “To heal up more?”

John shook his head. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.” He reached for his radio. “Radek!”

“Colonel?”

John blinked. Delos moved to stand beside him, wary, protective, and John was struck by the absurdity of it for a moment, Delos being protective of him, the Sheppards’ prodigal son.

Major Dorsey stood just beyond the invisible line where the privacy curtain would have been had it been drawn.

“Sorry, Radek, hang on. Major?”

“Sir.” Dorsey swallowed hard.

“I’m not your commanding officer anymore.”

“But you outrank me, and - and I need your help.”

John eyed him. Dorsey looked nervous and pale, but he kept his chin up. As much as John was tempted to tell Dorsey to man up and handle it, he wasn’t about to let his ego get in the way of defending Atlantis. “What do you need, Major?”

“The aerial patrols were ineffective, and the battle stations were irrelevant,” Dorsey said in a low voice. Good. He was being circumspect about not panicking the medical staff. “If those aliens return a third time -”

“We’ll need to get the hell out of dodge,” John said. “Establish evacuation lines and strategic reposition to the Alpha Site, with at least two gate jumps intervening.”

 _Strategic reposition to the rear_ meant _running away_.

Running away. Leaving Atlantis. The scientists and the soldiers would have to work together, to figure out how much they could carry and what they could afford to leave behind. But John needed to find Rodney - and Daniel - and he needed Radek to do it.

“Inform Woolsey of the attack,” John said, “and have Kusanagi start coordinating the scientists.”

Dorsey raised his eyebrows. “Kusanagi?”

“I need Zelenka with me.” John caught Dorsey’s gaze and held it, didn’t vampire mind-whammy to get Dorsey to fall in line, because John still outranked him, had more experience than him.

After only brief hesitation, Dorsey nodded. He turned away, tapping his radio and asking for Kusanagi as he hurried out of the infirmary.

“What now?” Delos asked.

“Now we see about getting Daniel and Rodney back,” John said. He tapped on his radio. “Hey Radek, I have an idea.”

“What kind of idea?”

“To find Rodney and Jackson.”

“How?”

“We know the ship entered hyperspace -”

“Which means they could be anywhere in the galaxy right now, if not the universe.”

“And we also know they most likely tracked the device in the lab via a subspace signal,” John said, keeping his tone patient.

“Why are you telling me what we already know?”

Rodney had rubbed off on Radek more than Radek knew or would probably care to admit. “You did some work with Lazlo Babai, didn’t you?”

“How did you know that?” Radek asked, and then said, “Oh. Of course. Come to Control. I need you.”

“Be right there.” John cast about for a shirt - the healing burns on his chest were itching beneath the bandage - and Delos handed it to him. John hopped off of the bed, shook out his limbs.

“Colonel,” Keller began.

“I’m fine,” John said.

“As the chief medical officer, I decide who is and isn’t fine,” Keller said, but she sighed. “I just - I don’t know enough about your physiology to treat you. You probably won’t even let me know if something hurts, so - Delos, you keep an eye on him.”

“Yes, Dr. Keller.” Delos inclined his politely, with all the manners and grace of a Renaissance prince - by all accounts he’d grown up like one - and then nodded at John, and together they headed for the nearest transporter.

John let Delos do the honors. When they stepped into Control, Radek was already there, having commandeered one of the consoles beside Chuck and Amelia.

“We are trying to isolate the subspace signal that drew the unknown aliens to us.” Radek patted the seat beside him, and John slid into it. He scooped up the datapad Radek wasn’t using and fired up one of the calculation programs, so he could write down his calculations and have Radek double-check them before implementing them. “We have isolated the signal traffic from the time Rodney unlocked the lab to the time the aliens breached the shield, but as you can guess, there was a lot of signal traffic.”

Atlantis was one big cluster of noisy signals - the radio systems the entire city was on, the signal system Atlantis used herself to communicate with John and the jumpers and other strong gene carriers, the signals the datapads and consoles were connected to, the subspace frequencies utilized by the jumpers, any signals that came through the Stargate from offworld teams or allies. Isolating a single subspace signal would be difficult, but not impossible.

Where Chuck was managing gate traffic, Amelia was helping Radek isolate different frequencies and eliminate them. Any signal that existed prior to Janus’s lab being discovered was immediately discounted. Unfortunately, the signal that alerted the aliens to the device may not have initiated as soon as the lab was unlocked; it may not have initiated until the device was activated while Rodney, Daniel, Delos, John, and other scientists were poking the devices in the lab. As all of them had the Gene, any one of them could have activated the device.

Between John, Amelia, and Radek, several cups of coffee (provided by Delos, who mostly hung around like a useless valet glaring at anyone who tried to interrupt), and several hours’ work, they’d isolated a band of signals that might be the one. Amelia ran them through the signal profile database she’d been building in her spare time, so they could eliminate any regular radio transmissions.

John watched, fascinated, as Amelia and Radek typed rapidly at the console, and one by one the different signals were eliminated, vanished. John’s heart was pounding. He knew Rodney was alive, could sense him that much, but he couldn’t reach out to him. Rodney’s mind was - fuzzy. Blocked. He knew Rodney was keeping his walls up, but it wasn’t even walls, it was something else. Distance. John didn’t think soulmates were ever supposed to be separated like this.

Delos said, quietly, “I know, Cousin.” Of course. He, too, was separated from his own soulmate by millions of light years.

Chuck said, “Dr. Zelenka, the _Daedalus_ should have dropped out of hyperspace by now. If we dial M5R-179, we should be able to raise them on the radio.”

Radek glanced at John, who nodded, so Radek said, “Dial it up.”

Chuck typed in the address, initiated the dialing sequence - so much faster than for Milky Way gates - and John summoned Major Dorsey so he could make the report to Woolsey and Caldwell.

An alarm sounded on Radek’s console, and he frowned. Leaned in, frowning deeper. “Oh, no, that is not good.”

“What’s not good?” John heard the urgent note in Radek’s voice, sensed the way his pulse sped up.

“There is an unprecedented power build-up in the event horizon,” Radek said.

Chuck frowned. “That’s impossible.”

“Why isn’t it good?” Delos asked.

Radek didn’t have to say it. John sensed it, on the surface of his mind. Catastrophic explosion. It would wipe out the entirety of Atlantis and a good chunk of the planet, if not ripping the planet apart entirely. That much energy compounded by the naquadah of the gate -

“Shut it down!” John snapped.

“Maybe the gate on the other end is faulty,” Amelia said. Her hands flew over the console. “I can’t shut it down.”

Major Dorsey came trotted into Control. “Colonel Sheppard, are we ready?”

John shook his head. “No. Get all non-essential personnel out of the tower, now!”

Dorsey blinked. “Sir?”

Chuck and the others looked at John uncertainly.

“Radek,” John said, “can you shut down the gate?”

“Can we not unplug it?” Delos added.

Radek shook his head vehemently. “No! I cannot stop the power build-up. The gate is going to explode.”

At the word ‘explode’, Dorsey burst into action. “You heard Colonel Sheppard! All non-essential personnel, evacuate to the far west pier!” He was on his radio, calling for the jumper patrols to swing around to the west pier and prepare to take on passengers. He hollered for the other jumpers who weren’t flying patrol to get into the air and follow suit.

“Radek?” John asked.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Collapse the shield around the gate,” John said.

Radek blinked. “What?”

“Focus the shield around the gate.”

“Not even the shield at full power can contain the blast,” Radek protested.

“Better some of it than none of it.”

All around them, people were streaming out of the tower. Chuck and Amelia, however, remained.

“You should go,” John said to them.

They shook their heads, helping Radek, all three of them bent over the control consoles, speaking half in code.

John said to Delos, “You should go too, Cousin.”

Delos shook his head. “You say Atlantis, at full power, can’t contain all the blast.”

“Which is why you should go.”

Delos unstrapped the knife he carried at his hip. “What if she were at more than full power?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were raised as a Hearth-boy, yes?”

John nodded warily.

“So can you share power with others?”

“I did it at Samhain a few times, but this is going to be a hell of a lot bigger than just a bonfire.”

“But you can do it, and also focus your power in a shield.”

It had been a damn long time since John had done that. “In a pinch.”

“This is a hell of a lot bigger than a pinch,” Delos said. “Dr. Zelenka, do you have the gate shielded?”

“Almost.”

Delos headed down toward the gate. “Come along, Cousin.”

John followed, intending to yank Delos toward the nearest transporter, but then Delos rolled up his sleeve and cut himself on the arm, the flick of the blade casual, practiced. He didn’t even flinch. Just because vampires had supernatural healing didn’t make them immune to pain. Delos was tougher than John had given him credit for.

“I don’t know if you know this,” Delos said, “but I’m one of the Wild Powers.” And blue energy gathered on his palm.

Wild Powers. Night World beings of unimaginable power. John had seen a wild power’s blue witchfire blow up entire boulders, entire cars. And that was a controlled blast. John stared at him.

Delos held the knife out to John and said, “You’re a Wild Power too.”

“Me? No. Impossible. I -”

“ _One from the land of kings long forgotten,_  
 _One from the hearth which still holds the spark,_  
 _One from the Day World where two eyes are watching,_  
 _One from the twilight to be one with the dark._ ” Delos recited it smoothly, evenly, like it was a poem.

John knew it was a prophecy. He shook his head. “No.”

“You lived as a witch as one barely in magic, as one in Circle Twilight, and now you are one with the dark,” Delos said. “Take the knife, Cousin, and give me your hand.”

John accepted the knife, still wet with his cousin’s blood, and opened a gash on his arm. Then he clasped his hand in Delos’s, and he stared as the blue fire in Delos’s other palm traveled up his arm, through his chest, and down his other arm to John’s hand.

“Colonel Sheppard,” Radek said. “I have collapsed the shield.”

John closed his eyes, and he could sense it, Atlantis’s humming, the way she was crouched down over herself, like a child warding off a blow. The shield was coiled tightly around the gate. It wasn’t enough. John stretched out one hand and felt the blue fire flow out of him and into the shield.

“Give over some of yourself, Cousin,” Delos whispered.

Light built behind John’s eyelids, brighter and brighter, burning, blinding, blue-white and white-hot.

An explosion rocked the control tower.

And like that, John remembered who and what he was. Remembered his mother’s death, remembered the shapeshifter who’d killed her, the one called Xander, the one with the blue eyes and dark hair and dimples in his wicked grin.

He opened his eyes. There was a blackened hole where the gate had once stood, but the burn marks stopped in precisely the radius of the shield.

Radek said something in Czech that was probably crude and relieved all at once.

John let go of Delos’s hand, flexed his fingers. His mother hadn’t been killed by hunters. She’d been killed by rogue shapeshifters, some of whom were supposed to be Forsaken, forlorn.

Lorne.

“That’s why you’re here?” John asked.

Delos blinked at him, arm cradled to his chest like it pained him. The wound on his arm was healing, though. “Here for what?”

“To help me stop the Dragon,” John said. It all made sense.

Delos’s eyes went wide. “Cousin, no -”

“We need to find Rodney.” John spun on his heel and headed back up to Control. “Come on, Radek. We need to find Rodney, and we need to contact the _Daedalus_ , and then it’s time to go to war.”


End file.
